Curious how this trait is American? Is there something about the way Americans speak that is fake?
If I share it with a Polish or German friend and he says it's "not bad" then I know he is really impressed.
One of the main reasons that killed my desire to move to the US was the amount of fake questions during - on a paper - friendly discussions, when the point of those questions was just, and only just, visibility. An average American non corporate discussion is worse than a non-American corporate one. And that seems to be pretty global to me.
My brother and my sister-in-law watched “Somebody feeds Phil”, and we watched together the Sydney episode and after that some others, because I’d just announced that I’d move to Australia soon. That Sydney episode had quite normal discussions for us, Europeans. Of course, people had agenda, but they still reacted to what response they got. Even if things were cut, most times people seemed to react to something else from before. Then the next episode was from Las Vegas. And it had full with questions where nobody responded to the answers, nobody cared what the response was. And they kept those in the episode. There was a point when Phil asked the people in a line one-by-one what they work. And they basically just listed it, Phil had zero responses to any answers. Zero reactions from anybody. The point wasn’t to engage with the answers or the people. There was another case, when a girl talked about her shop. There wasn’t a single sentence which was organically connected to another. Phil and the girl had different agenda and they had to perform based on those, no matter what. And I was enough now there to say that that happens way more frequently than elsewhere. The next one was from Manila. And there were organic discussions again. I’ve never seen that clearly this phenomenon which bugs me. Of course, the usual scripting which happens with these shows, even helped to make this more announced. Probably, the people talking in that episode were way less interesting, but still as a visual to what annoys me is quite good.
Of course, I had good conversations also over there, and I had bad ones elsewhere in this sense. Heck, I did similar things before, but maybe this is the exact reason why I’m so sensitive to this, because it annoyed me greatly when I did it. But on average, it was the worse over the pond. Especially on the extremities. But even in day-to-day discussions. It was annoying that I have to peal down an additional layer with anybody to get real answers, which is not needed basically anywhere else.
1. e.g. lots of smiling, use of superlatives like "great"/"amazing" to describe mediocre items/effort/results
Execs are ‘super excited’ about everything. There is no dynamic range at all. They appear to have no opinions and no judgement because their opinion is always that everything is awesome. When the audience knows that stuff is either normal-level ok or actually fucked up, this message is insulting to receive.
Worse, it trains people downstream that shiny happy is the only valid comms. Hard to escalate a concern when you don’t know how to start the message with how super excited you are about it.
It drove me crazy during my corporate period.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
At least to my British ears, Americans rarely sound authentic.
Its always grandiose statements and elaborate smiles.
See these old videos, where people talk in a straightforward way:
Car transmission https://youtu.be/JOLtS4VUcvQ
How to dial your phone https://youtu.be/PuYPOC-gCGA
The dial comes to town https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q
Now go watch that Apple video again and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
This is the type of people that sent us to the Moon. No non-sense engineers.
"I may be wrong", but perhaps 'Americans rarely sound authentic' to you simply because you're just more familiar with your own culture's idiosyncrasies?
Anyway, I love the Brits; no flame intended. I come in peace! :-)
"But, I've never done that. I'm pretty much always positive about things people present. I even said some of them weren't bad"
Yeah, high praise comes in subtle flavours if you're a Brit.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
Any native knows that "Interesting, but perhaps we should reconsider" means "You're an idiot and I don't understand how you ever learned to breathe."
The pinnacle is "Not bad", which can mean either deep approval or blistering contempt, depending on tone of voice.
It drives foreigners insane. But of course it's not our fault if they never learned English.
It’s like ‘American corporate’ is a totally different language that I don’t speak. The words sound the same, but that’s about it.
I think they mean well. But it feels weird.